If you are unable to attend, PLEASE be sure to cancel your ticket as SPACE is LIMITED.

Description:

Healthcare innovation cannot be done in silos. It requires the interplay of different people with different expertise: clinicians, scientists, government workers, industry executives, and students – these are the people that make up the Pillars of Health.

Pillars of Health is an interdisciplinary networking event with the mission to provide a platform for these pillars, these people, to interact, discuss ideas, and share information in a free and open space. On behalf of the University of Toronto, Health Innovation Hub (H2i), and the Translational Research Program (TRP) we would like to INVITE YOU to join us for our second Pillars of Health Networking Event!

If you are a student, clinician, researcher, entrepreneur, healthcare professional, government official or industry SME/executive with an interest and passion for advancing Canadian innovation in health and life sciences, please join us on Feb 26th, 2018 from 4PM-7PM. You will have the opportunity to share a discussion table with key opinion leaders from multiple healthcare related sectors in the Toronto community and exchange innovative ideas on a range of entrepreneurship topics. Registration starts at 3:30pm.

Food and refreshments will be provided.

About JLabs:
JLABS @ Toronto is a 40,000-square-foot life sciences incubator, providing entrepreneurs with shared lab space, offices and modular lab suites. The labs provide a flexible environment for start-up companies pursuing new technologies and research platforms to advance medical care. JLABS @ Toronto also links the entrepreneurs of Toronto with the full breadth of Johnson & Johnson Innovation, including opportunities for funding, third-party services, educational events and R&D experts from medical technology, consumer healthcare product and Janssen pharmaceutical teams. As with all the other JLABS sites, JLABS @ Toronto is a “no strings attached” model, Johnson & Johnson Innovation does not take an equity stake in the companies occupying JLABS and the companies are free to develop products – either on their own, or by initiating a separate external partnership with Johnson & Johnson Innovation or any other company.

Health researchers, students and industry professionals were encouraged to forge new connections at H2i’s Pillars of Health event (photo by Chris Sorensen)

More than 200 health researchers, students and industry professionals – many connected to the University of Toronto – gathered at JLABS @ Toronto Monday for an interdisciplinary networking event designed to spark innovation and entrepreneurship.

Guest speaker Pat Furlong, the founding president of the U.S. non-profit Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy, which she helped create in the mid-1990s after she lost both her sons to Duchenne muscular dystrophy, emphasized the critical importance of working across disciplines in the health-care sector.

The rest of the evening was dedicated to making connections between people who might not normally cross paths.

Pat Furlong founded Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy, a U.S. non-profit, after she lost both her sons to Duchenne muscular dystrophy (photo by Chris Sorensen)

“The thing about innovation, we’ve learned, is that it happens not in isolation, but between people,” said Joseph Ferenbok, an assistant professor in U of T’s Faculty of Medicine who is TRP’s director and a co-director of H2i, one of several entrepreneurship hubs on campus.

“If you can bring in a group of different thinkers, with different ideas, backgrounds and experiences, then the creativity and problem-solving takes on a whole new momentum.”

It’s easier said than done given the size of Toronto’s life sciences cluster. The Toronto Academic Health Science Network comprises U of T and nine research hospitals, while an estimated 1,000 health-focused institutes and local companies are involved in moving research from the lab into the broader health-care industry.

H2i’s co-directors Paul Santerre, an entrepreneur and professor in the faculty of denistry, and Joseph Ferenbok, the director of U of T’s Translational Research Program (photo by Chris Sorensen)

To help facilitate interactions, student volunteers wandered the room with flashing red LED lights dangling from their lanyards. Their job was to facilitate conversations between strangers after consulting a smartphone app that listed all of the event’s attendees and their backgrounds.

“If you want to meet someone in a particular pillar or industry, you can come up to one of the ambassadors and they can do a search for you,” Ferenbok said.

A volunteer helps make connections between attendees (photo by Chris Sorensen)

A similar networking event was held last year that incorporated a speed-dating format. But organizers later decided a less-structured approach was more likely to yield the desired results.

“People just ended up chatting,” said volunteer Craig Madho, who is in his second year of a master’s in health sciences at U of T. “We decided we didn’t actually need the speed-dating to break down those walls.”